Introduction
As we became aware of AIDS it had some of the science fiction characteristics of the Andromeda Strain. Here was an apparently quite new disease that was not even, in conventional terms, a disease at all, but rather a syndrome that opened the body to the ravages of a whole set of unusual bacterial, viral and fungal infections which in most cases proved fatal, and which was neither airborne nor spread by casual contact but rather through blood and semen. Researchers concentrated fairly quickly on the likelihood that it was caused by a virus, but until the French and American discoveries of 1983-84 there was no conclusive evidence for this assumption.
The first cases of what can now be defined as AIDS were reported in the medical literature in the late 1970s, although there are rumors of even earlier cases. (Aaron Shurin, 1983.)
In Denmark, in France and in Belgium these early cases have been traced back to links with central Africa. Dr. Frederick Siegal of New York reports that in 1979 he saw a woman from the Dominican Republic with "an inexplicable illness" that he now feels was AIDS. Siegal goes on to say:
How many patients there were who slipped away unnoticed as she did before the disease reached the point of recognition will always be unknown, primarily because the sort of immunologic workup she received was not widely available to people of her background of poverty. At the time, most doctors wouldn't even have thought to inquire about the state of her immunity. (Andrew Holleran, 1983)
It was only in the spring of 1981 that reports from both coasts of unexpected illnesses among otherwise healthy young men -pneumocystis. Carinii (PCP) in Los Angeles, Kaposi's sarcoma (KS) in New York and California, severe anal herpes in New York -alerted physicians to the idea that something beyond individual cases was occurring........
